Here's a quick little pat on the back for my little "iBook That Could" coupled with some good old fashioned PC mud slinging.
I had an extremely important client conference in Orlando this past weekend. They dropped a quarter million dollars on this thing. All their sales people and distributors came and were treated to several days of seminars intermingled with entertainment (Seaworld, Casino night, lavish dinners, endless booze, etc.). Anyhoo, I was responsible for putting together an on-the-fly video consisting of pan-and-scanned photos taken during the events. Which meant the video would not be completed until just before it was shown. The marketing director and I had been planning this video for two months, gathering media and storyboarding the thing. In short, the pressure was big. It HAD to go smoothly.
So I got a little iBook. The littlest one. Trying to save some coin, since I really didn't need a laptop particularly. It performed like a champ. No crashes, no problems, just what I expected. Sure, it lagged a little on the final render, but I was ahead of schedule, so it was fine.
On the other side, my client had six PCs that brought down to work on PowerPoint presentations and otherwise organize the event by printing schedules, etc. THREE OF THEM WOULDN'T BOOT! That's right, three out of six PC laptops wouldn't even boot. And these are decent, modern laptops. HPs and Dells. Nothing to sneeze at. And of the remaining three, only one of them had a CD burner! Apple's entire line can burn at least basic CD media. Unbelievable. This posed a huge problem when at one point they realized they had some critical files on a PC with no burner! Geniuses. I tried doing a basic ethernet connection to the PC, but couldn't get it to work. Admittedly, I NEVER use Windows, so I didn't know how to turn on file sharing. Had I known how to do that, I imagine the iBook would have seen it perfectly. By the time I started messing with it, someone saved the day with one of those little USB dongle things. Very cool actually for stuff like that. The iBook greeted the dongle perfectly. I thought it might not notice it or reject it. Not at all.
At one point, someone wanted to download files off their digital camera, but couldn't because they didn't install the software. I just giggled quietly, then asked for the camera, plugged it in, DL-ed them and handed it back. Still chuckling.
In the end, the final movie edit was great. They loved it. Thanks iBook!
I had an extremely important client conference in Orlando this past weekend. They dropped a quarter million dollars on this thing. All their sales people and distributors came and were treated to several days of seminars intermingled with entertainment (Seaworld, Casino night, lavish dinners, endless booze, etc.). Anyhoo, I was responsible for putting together an on-the-fly video consisting of pan-and-scanned photos taken during the events. Which meant the video would not be completed until just before it was shown. The marketing director and I had been planning this video for two months, gathering media and storyboarding the thing. In short, the pressure was big. It HAD to go smoothly.
So I got a little iBook. The littlest one. Trying to save some coin, since I really didn't need a laptop particularly. It performed like a champ. No crashes, no problems, just what I expected. Sure, it lagged a little on the final render, but I was ahead of schedule, so it was fine.
On the other side, my client had six PCs that brought down to work on PowerPoint presentations and otherwise organize the event by printing schedules, etc. THREE OF THEM WOULDN'T BOOT! That's right, three out of six PC laptops wouldn't even boot. And these are decent, modern laptops. HPs and Dells. Nothing to sneeze at. And of the remaining three, only one of them had a CD burner! Apple's entire line can burn at least basic CD media. Unbelievable. This posed a huge problem when at one point they realized they had some critical files on a PC with no burner! Geniuses. I tried doing a basic ethernet connection to the PC, but couldn't get it to work. Admittedly, I NEVER use Windows, so I didn't know how to turn on file sharing. Had I known how to do that, I imagine the iBook would have seen it perfectly. By the time I started messing with it, someone saved the day with one of those little USB dongle things. Very cool actually for stuff like that. The iBook greeted the dongle perfectly. I thought it might not notice it or reject it. Not at all.
At one point, someone wanted to download files off their digital camera, but couldn't because they didn't install the software. I just giggled quietly, then asked for the camera, plugged it in, DL-ed them and handed it back. Still chuckling.
In the end, the final movie edit was great. They loved it. Thanks iBook!
